


Imipramine

by drurie



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M, Malfoycest, Narcissism, tagged underage just in case
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-24
Updated: 2016-05-24
Packaged: 2018-06-10 10:19:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6952684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drurie/pseuds/drurie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lucius Malfoy loves perfection. Perhaps it was only inevitable that it was a path that would eventually lead to his son.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Imipramine

**Author's Note:**

> This is a short fic that I wrote some time back in 2012 as one of my first small forays into Lucius/Draco. I did a little cleaning up, but I've kept it as it is mostly.

Lucius Malfoy sweeps his hair back into a defined ponytail.

In the summer of 1992, he buttons his immaculate coat up to his throat despite the searing heat, and strides out into the lawn, the sun glaring down from above.

Lucius Malfoy is not crazy.

His son and wife stand outside already, his son in Quidditch gear, his wife with a swaying picnic basket.

Blond, blond and blonde.

Narcissa smiles and settles herself in the shade, throwing her long blonde hair in a fashion not dissimilar to Lucius. He smiles back, pleased. They make a good couple. Heads of white, bodies wrapped in black, almost equal in stature and with equal temperament.

His son, however, is a completely different case.

Lucius believes he must have spoiled the boy too much, because his face is screwed up in disdain all the time, one foot stuck out in front of the other, tapping furiously on the ground whenever he feels impatient- which is always. The hilt of hipbones and the tilt of sharp shoulder blades cut the bright scenery into two painfully distinctly dissimilar halves.

He taps Draco’s leg warningly with his cane. The boy shifts back upright, and the world is clear again.

* * *

Lucius remembers spending much time perfecting his smirk when he was younger. Many have said that Draco’s slant of lips is exactly like his – but not to him. He tosses a stray strand of hair back irritably at that thought. The smirk that his son throws so casually around carries less weight than his. It’s not the same, because Draco is always imperfect, what with his uncontrollable emotions and inability to walk with his spine straight at all times.

Lucius’ face when neutral, however, is beautifully symmetrical, he stands with equal weight on both feet and both his shoulders are thrown just a little back the same distance to emphasise his authority.

When he tugs that one corner of his lips up, it breaks that symmetry.

He finds it a horrible sight to behold in the mirror. He thinks that that has to be why people cower around him.

* * *

In 1993, Lucius finds himself in a terrible rage.

Draco, with his arm in a cast tied securely up in a bandage, looks away from his seat in the chair.

“Look straight up,” Lucius snaps tiredly.

Draco does, eyes clicking in focus with Lucius’ and posture straightening. Lucius feels his headache subside, but his head still persists in throbbing.

“How long?” his cane brushes the cover of the cast swiftly. Draco winces and squirms a little just at that. Lucius frowns.

“About a week will do. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to displease…”

“Keep it on for longer.”

Lucius grits his teeth at the thought of his son walking around the halls for about a month looking like _that_ , epitome of imperfection and imbalance. But at least he will be in the Manor hidden away from that vile sight. And it is a little sacrifice to pay to get back at that unsalvageable blemish of a Hippogriff and the half semblance of a man for causing this temporary disfigurement.

* * *

About a year later, Lucius finds the plot to destroy both monsters entirely thwarted by another abomination of a person- Harry Potter.

He hates his unruly hair, that scar which marks the right side of the face as so different from the other, the uneven spectacles, the shabby clothes, the lazy smile, the lopsided robes and mismatched socks and his shoes which are more scuffed in the front than at the back. Everything is disgusting about that boy, and yet Draco trails after his odd shadow.

Lucius tosses furiously in his bed. Narcissa lies silently still, awake or not, he does not care.

Filthy halfblood. He sees the blood coursing through Potter’s veins as literally two vials next to each other in a potion brewery. Half crystal clear, half indistinguishable from common dirt.

Mudbloods are the worst. His Master may be the paramount of horrendous physically, but it is a slight fault compared to the blood that runs through those creatures. He imagines it and shudders. Brown as swirling earth is after a harsh rainstorm. Too murky to peer into the depths to see the worms that crawl beneath.

He has to save Draco from the whole lot of them.

* * *

In early 1995, Lucius paces up and down a corridor of the Manor.

Arrest is imminent, it has to be. The distant memory of the pungent smell of Azkaban fills his mind. He throws his head back again to bottle the bile back into his stomach.

He claws angrily at the tattoo on his left arm. While he had thought this disfigurement was a small price to pay many years ago, he now finds himself feeling more and more so that this path is – he grips his book slightly too tightly, for he despises the word – a _mistake_.

He never looks at it anymore when he steps out of the bath. In fact, he starts looking at his mirror less. The mirror notices it and occasionally calls him out on it. He shrugs it off. Self-scrutiny of the reflective kind is something that he prefers to avoid.

* * *

One day, whilst examining his new robes for stray threads, he distantly wonders if he should start seeking perfection elsewhere.

* * *

He whistles a sigh of relief the next time he sees his son. He’s grown up better than Lucius would have bet on a few years ago.

Draco no longer scampers like a little rat over to his parents with his hair all askew. Now he walks with a proud poise and does not ask for hugs or rattle on endlessly about needless things. He pecks his mother on the cheek, and offers to take his father’s coat.

Lucius smiles the way he would have to Narcissa.

* * *

Narcissa complains a little every now and then when she dares about how uptight their son has become.

Lucius gives a deep glare that he would have reserved for past Draco and ignores her with a flourish of his quill.

Narcissa breathes nervously about the Dark Lord.

Narcissa hints about defecting to the Order.

Narcissa stops her social gatherings and slinks around the house, a frightened shadow.

Lucius bristles at her weaknesses and pushes her further behind into the back of his mind.

Draco sits silently with his eyes alert and lips slightly parted with a sliver of white front teeth. He watches Lucius busy himself from his affirmative seat in an armchair. His hands are placed gently, equal distance upon the end of the arms of the chair. His legs are crossed in a manner that is only purposeful. He is so quiet and so emotionless that the breeze of sunlight highlighting the tips of his sleek hair serves nothing to shatter his immobile beauty.

Lucius laughs in joy.

Draco’s silver eyes rove over to his face and mouth.

Lucius nods in approval.

The immobility is torn apart as he laughs back softly, right hand covering his lips, left hand clutching the cushion of the arm of the chair.

Lucius does not realise that he is unperturbed by the distortion of the boy’s posture. His heart races and he longs to find out if perfection has slowly started blessing itself upon his son.

* * *

The end of the days is coming.

Lucius inhales the now heady smell of the Manor drowsily and pictures a younger day.

Draco curls up more tightly against his arm, sleeping soundlessly.

He admires how their skin is the exact same shade. Sometime last month, he had banished Narcissa, who was falling so terribly apart, to another bedroom, and drawn the growing boy of developing perfection closer into his life.

He slides his mouth easily over the fuller one.

The boy stirs and silver eyes slowly move up to look at him. He feels the mouth below him pull into an equal smile.

He draws back to study that face, whose owner meets him with same eagerness. The nose slices the adolescent face into two immaculate halves. The sunlight today accentuates the even contours and curves of that face and unscarred body.

Lucius almost chokes in his pride.

He uses his body to press the other back into the bed and allows one arrogant tear to escape into the pillow cover.

“Don’t let them take you away, Father.”

* * *

Days wind and twirl themselves around Lucius’ heart, alternating between senseless blurs and amazing moments of clarity and pain.

Draco is an astonishing constant. Lucius, however, finds to his horror that he himself is no longer what he was, and is spinning into the weakness that he has so tried to escape. His frailness grows whenever he thinks of being away from Draco.

He finally looks into the mirror and finds no trace of all the perfection he once saw. He is no longer one or independent. He needs Draco.

Can only one person in the Manor hold perfection? In his hopes for Draco, had he given up some of his perfection and transferred it to his son? If that is so, perhaps it means that he is really no longer one person, but in fact, two.

That has to explain why Draco and him are so close now.

Draco locks arms with him and presses comfortingly into his side.

He thinks he’s going insane.

He will be an easy one to take to Azkaban.

* * *

Summer is dying.

Soon, Draco will be carted off to that horrid hell of a school and him, likely to be caught and thrown into the rotting shell of a prison.

Fates so similar, they had to be the same.

“What happens when things die before they reach their prime?” Draco questions abruptly in the garden. He clasps a bunch of freshly-picked pink roses.

Lucius stares at the weeds and dead flowers they have removed just minutes ago with their hands.

“Their potential is squandered away, and eventually, they are forgotten.”

Lucius feels Draco place his head against his tense shoulder.

“I’ll make sure we’re never forgotten, then.”

* * *

One morning in the end summer of 1995, Lucius awakes to the damp sweat of their two bodies, and _he knows_ that this will be the year that he will be found and taken away.

He uses his hand to tilt his son’s sleeping face towards him.

Draco does not stir for now, so he runs a finger over his eyelids and face to memorise the slight faults along with the overall perfection. He does not withdraw in disgust as he thought he would have when he finds them, and it worries him, because he’s afraid that he might have forgotten perfection.

Lucius Malfoy is not crazy.

He whispers his fears to himself under his breath repeatedly.

Lucius Malfoy only enjoys symmetry, perfection a little bit more than the average person.

He runs a hand through his hair and tries to calm down his anticipation at being torn apart from the pooling reflection of himself beneath him.

Draco Malfoy opens his eyes so alike to his and stares and stares.

Lucius Malfoy falls silent and wraps himself hurriedly around his comforting son, his likeness.

They sit in that unplanned embrace for what feels like an eternity to Lucius. He holds on to the falling scraps and snatches of dreams of flawlessness and Draco till the day when the ornate doors of the Manor cave in and the skies and allure of perfection are ripped out of Lucius’ life and replaced by damp dungeons, asymmetrical, rusting gates and cold dirt on his skin.

* * *

Many years after the Second War, Lucius Malfoy finds the slightly crisped pictures of perfection and slowly pastes them back into his life.

Draco does not forget to be in them, as he had promised in 1995.


End file.
